This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Industrial networking requires predictable and reliable communications between devices. Deterministic networking (DetNet) refers to networks that can guarantee the delivery of packets within a bounded time. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is attempting to propose standards that can be applied to wireless devices for the stringent requirements of deterministic networks (e.g., minimal jitter, low latency, minimal packet loss). The IETF has proposed a routing protocol (“6TiSCH”) that provides IPv6 routing using time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) based on IEEE 802.15.4e for higher reliability.
The 6TiSCH architecture specifies a Channel distribution/usage (CDU) matrix of “cells”, each cell representing a unique wireless channel at a unique timeslot. The 6TiSCH architecture also specifies that a centralized Path Computation Element (PCE) determines and installs a track comprising a sequence of cells for each hop along a path from a source to a destination, for deterministic forwarding of a data packet. However, the required programming by the PCE of both the routes and the schedule inside each hop along the deterministic path results in minimal flexibility in terms of forwarding packets; moreover, there has been no known technique to readily determine the deterministic performance along the deterministic path.